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Category: Libraries and Librarians

Uncovering Research Practices in Student Writing

Published by Iris on Friday, February 18th, 2011

When I was a baby librarian, I thought Information Literacy was about searching and evaluating. The ACRL standards had some other stuff in there, but it seemed like abstract stuff that I couldn’t do much about. Keywords, operators, relevance, currency, authority — just learn the formula and my work here is done. No wonder librarians were the only people who cared about information literacy, I thought.

In my defense, I was young. In my defense, this is how it had been presented to me all the way up through library school.

In the past three years, I’ve been part of a project that really expanded my thinking and made me fall in love with what information literacy could be and with the ways in which it really is relevant to people and projects on my campus.

But let me back up.

All of our sophomores are required to submit a portfolio of their writing, and passing this assessment is a graduation requirement. When they submit their portfolios, they’re given the choice of designating that their writing can be used for research, which many of them do, and lately the college has been doing three large projects (that I know of) based on these writing portfolios.

  1. Our quantitative initiative (QUiRK) reads a subset of the papers to determine how sophomores use quantitative evidence in their writing.*
  2. The writing program and SERC are pairing up for the Tracer Project, which studies how faculty development (which includes writing portfolio assessment) impacts student learning.
  3. And starting in 2008, we in the library have been reading portfolios to see how information literacy is revealed in academic writing at the sophomore level.

As part of that last one, my department had fascinating hours of discussion about what we could and couldn’t evaluate about information literacy when presented with a finished paper. One of the most interesting and useful of these discussions (for me) was the one which revealed that we could, in fact, assess evaluation of sources even when the paper didn’t use “outside” sources beyond primary sources or sources prescribed by the professor. We could watch students picking primary sources, even from assigned readings, that worked well together and could be used to make a compelling point, or we could see them cramming two such sources together and either treating them entirely separately or in other ways not using them instrumentally toward making a point. We also confirmed what we had always suspected: that implementation of attribution was about more than just mechanics, and that failures in attribution could often signal a fundamental misunderstandings of the sources the student was using or of the purpose of reporting evidence in the first place. And we articulated for ourselves some of the ways in which integrating evidence into a paper can help or hinder the student’s rhetorical goals.

We couldn’t assess much (if anything) about the actual steps in the process that resulted in the writing we had in front of us, but we could look for habits of mind associated with using evidence, and we could look for the ways in which conventions of communicating evidence manifest in sophomore level student writing.

In the end, after much testing and revision, we came up with a rubric for assessing information literacy in writing and sat down to score papers. And yesterday, we finally presented our work and some preliminary findings, handed around a sample of student writing and watched as the faculty and staff attendees pulled interesting and useful insights out of the writing and then all came up with exactly the same score on the rubric (inter-reader reliability!), and had a fun discussion about how this could be used on campus to build shared expectations for information literacy and to help inform our teaching.

For my part, participating in this project has fundamentally changed one of the major ways I think about my work. It was so liberating for me to realize in concrete fashion that “information literacy” does not equal “the research paper.” All of a sudden I discovered that I do have something to contribute to those parts of the curriculum that interest me but that don’t produce traditional research projects. All of a sudden I realized that I don’t have to help faculty squeeze research projects into courses where those projects don’t fit naturally, and that instead we could talk about context-building skills or source interpretation skills for thought-pieces, class discussions, and other non-research assignments.

For me, this project helped me realize that I actually do like the concept of information literacy and that it actually does have meaningfully deep and cross-cutting applications on a liberal arts college campus — that it’s not simply about making mini-librarians out of our students or about searching for searching’s sake. I’m hoping that as we open it up to include faculty readers this year, that same sense seeps through the campus. I hope this is something we can get behind and dig into and find interesting, and that what we learn from analyzing these portfolios will meaningfully inform our practice as teachers.

I’m just so excited about this project, and so glad to be involved in it. It’s probably been the most eye-opening and practice-changing project I’ve participated in.

* Rutz, Carol and Nathan D. Grawe. “Pairing WAC and Quantitative Reasoning through Portfolio Assessment and Faculty Development,” Across the Disciplines, December 2009; Grawe, Nathan D., Neil S. Lutsky, and Christopher J. Tassava. “ A Rubric for Assessing Quantitative Reasoning in Written Arguments,” Numeracy, January 2010.
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First Year Seminars: Multi-disciplinarity vs Un-disciplinarity

Published by Iris on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

Last weekend I attended a workshop called Teaching and Maintaining Mulitdisciplinary First-Year Seminar Programs hosted at the gorgeous Pomona College campus. I expect this is the first of a couple of blog posts drawing on my experiences there.

It seemed like a lot of the impetus for having multi-discipinary seminars had at least as much to do with a skepticism about the transferable skills within a disciplinary seminar as it did with positive benefits of multi-disciplinary work. (And I think there are a lot of benefits to multi-disciplinary work in these circumstances.) Institutions have a lot at stake with these seminars, helping students make the transition from high school to college and getting them up to speed with college-level writing skills and college-level critical thinking skills and college-level classroom discussion skills. But I think sometimes those goals seem so huge that we end up with the classic problem of not narrowing our research topics. Some parameters usually help us think deeply and carefully — narrow topics are often richer than broad ones.

I kept wanting to protest that fleeing the disciplines in order to isolate these skills from any particular discipline not only made the skills seem that much more insurmountable but also mis-characterized “multi-disciplinary” as “non-disciplinary.” There’s no such thing as “non-disciplinary.” Not only is multi-disciplinary work a discipline unto itself, but there’s just no such thing as a work with all the skills of the disciplines but none of the topical constraints. A college essay is just as much a learned genre as a lab report or a close reading, so teaching students “to write” first, as if it’s a free-floating skill outside of the disciplines, seems like a fallacy to me. All we’re doing is teaching the genre of writing we’ve most internalized as “basic,” first. And that may be a valid approach, but that doesn’t make it generic.

Divorcing skills from content always feels easier to teach, but actually renders each hollow, I think. I remember the language faculty at a recent conference bemoaning the fact that they have interesting topics to think about and teach, but that their students need so much grammar training first. And I remember feeling like this was exactly my problem, too, because I like to teach about epistemology and scholarly communication and critical thinking, but sometimes this means teaching boolean logic and LCSH first.

And then I think about the classes I’ve taught with professors who were willing and eager to interact with the research process in front of their students and build on the day’s discussions or readings in the process, and how marrying content and skills always felt so much richer and more real as a consequence.

And I wonder if fleeing disciplinarity, as such, is really the best way to teach these skills that everyone hopes all first year students will learn. Maybe, it’s equally valid to think about the skills, the learning goals, and build them into classes regardless of disciplinary or interdisciplinary focus.

Or maybe the value of fleeing disciplinarity is that the professors feel like the work is denaturalized and are therefore better able to articulate some of these principles that are otherwise invisible from long acquaintance.

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Once is a fluke, three times is a trend: Digital humanities arrive in my world

Once is a fluke, three times is a trend: Digital humanities arrive in my world

Published by Iris on Tuesday, January 25th, 2011

I’d kind of expected a slow ramp-up. After all, this is the humanities, and as a humanist myself I know that change does happen, but only as long as you don’t watch for it too hard, kind of like watching water boil.  This term, the water boiled.

Within the space of two weeks, three students from three different language & literature majors came to me for advice on scanning, OCR, conventions of web design, hypertext literature, digital annotations, and (of course) copyright. For two of these, the students were developing senior thesis projects outside of the usual templates of a research paper or essay exam.

I foresee discussions about a coordinated support model for student work in the digital humanities in my near future. Luckily, the data services group has been meeting for a couple of years already and probably has some good advice about mounting a service that requires input from multiple departments on campus, so hopefully we can crib from their work.

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Specialization: License to jump off the deep end?

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

In some ways, it’s probably overkill to have subject librarians teaching loyally for the first year seminars in their subjects. I know there were several courses I taught for last term, first year seminars in my departments, that any of my colleagues could have taught for as well or better than I did. And yet, if that happened regularly, when would I ever get to teach classes after saying flat out, “You don’t need to have them do research in order to fulfill the information literacy requirement for the class” to faculty who couldn’t work a research component into their courses?

And so a few times last term I found myself coming up with ways to integrate information literacy into courses that had no real research component. And it was fun.

I wonder if I’d have the guts to suggest such a session in a physics course, where I know much less about how knowledge is created and how scholars ask questions and what counts as evidence. I wonder if I’d be able to build up the kind of knowledge that would allow me to suggest this to a physics course if I were more of a generalist in my teaching. Maybe I could if I were a lot better at that kind of thinking than I am, but for me being a subject librarian paid off big time with these non-research-based first year seminars. Talk about unforeseen outcomes.

Of course, I’m still wondering if that was the responsible course of action. But it was fun, and it didn’t seem to do actual harm, and it got people thinking about information literacy in more nuanced ways. So maybe I don’t have to hand in my librarian credentials just yet?

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